In fact, it reminded him a lot of his day job, which involves consulting for mining and oil companies. When he talks about a subject he's interested in-and he's interested in many things, from military encryption to freshwater fossils-his words start to run into each other.Īs a trained statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford University, Srivastava was intrigued by the technical problem posed by the lottery ticket.

He has a neatly trimmed beard and a messy office. Srivastava speaks quietly, with a slight stammer. 'This is the smallest amount you can win, but I can't tell you how excited it made me,' he says. Srivastava matched up each of his numbers with the digits on the boards, and much to his surprise, the ticket had a tic-tac-toe. If three of 'Your Numbers' appeared on a board in a straight line, you'd won. The goal was to scrape off the latex and compare the numbers under it to the digits on the boards. On the left was a box headlined 'Your Numbers,' covered with a scratchable latex coating. Its design was straightforward: On the right were eight tic-tac-toe boards, dense with different numbers. The second ticket was a tic-tac-toe game. 'I thought, 'This is exactly why I never play these dumb games.'' 'The first was a loser, and I felt pretty smug,' Srivastava says. He fished a coin out of a drawer and began scratching off the latex coating. The tickets were cheap scratchers-a gag gift from his squash partner-and Srivastava found himself wondering if any of them were winners. Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto, was working in his office in June 2003, waiting for some files to download onto his computer, when he discovered a couple of old lottery tickets buried under some paper on his desk.

Hoq to play scratch off lottery